CHILDREN.
Child-life—Love of children—Desire for
them—Child-birth—After-birth—Early days—The baby’s food—The
“first-eating”—Superstitions connected with infancy—Carrying of
babies—Teething—Visits to the local shrine—Toddling—Weaning—The
kindergarten and primary school—The girls’ high school—The middle
school—The popularity of middle schools—Hitting—Exercises and
diversions—Collections.
Japan has been called the Paradise of Babies; and certain it is that
childhood passes very happily in this country. In every family its
children have a free run of the whole house; there is neither a
nursery to which they can be confined nor any room which is exempt
from their invasion. They are the real masters of the house; and
father, mother, elder brother and sister are their willing slaves.
They will romp unchidden into the parlour and interrupt the visitor
whom the father or mother is there receiving; and the visitor too,
be he friend, relative, or comparative stranger, never takes such
intrusion amiss, but on the contrary, pays court to them as he knows
well that through them the softest spot in the father’s heart is
reached and the mother’s goodwill won. The parent, following the
common custom of the country, deprecates any words uttered in their
praise, for it is considered as great a breach of good manners to
extol one’s children, or for that matter, husband, wife, or any other
member of the family, as to belaud oneself. The mother, burning as
she may be to expatiate upon her children’s marvellous sharpness or
sagacity, will to the last speak disparagingly of them, but in a tone
which clearly expects from the hearer an emphatic protest against her
depreciation of her own offspring. Indeed, to take her at her word
would be to incur her undying displeasure.
Children too, on their part, brighten every household; and were it
not for their enlivening presence, the Japanese home with its
staid manners and cold civilities would be intolerably dull. The
wife, debarred as she usually is by household duties from social
distractions, would if childless lead a monotonous life; and the
absence of little ones she would take to heart as if she were
personally to blame for it and feel that she has missed the primary
object for which she entered into wedlock. She would also have to put
up sometimes with the reproaches of her husband or his parents for
this failure of issue and consent to the adoption of a child to whom
she must concede the love which she had hoped to reserve for her own
flesh and blood. But happily for the wife, we are on the whole a
prolific nation untroubled by the phantom of race suicide, and every
woman is prepared to bring up a family, which is in her eyes as much
the wife’s destiny as in girlhood she looked upon marriage as her
inevitable fate. Her absolute concentration upon her own home, though
it is a serious obstacle to her social development, brings its
compensation when her wedded life is crowned with maternity, and in
the smiles of infancy she finds ample consolation for the monotony of
her home. This intense love of children is one of the brightest traits
of Japanese home life, and with the reverence for old age, gives it a
tone of quiet, undemonstrative happiness.
It will therefore be readily imagined with what eagerness the arrival
of the little stranger, is awaited and how the childless wife will
move heaven and earth for the blessings of motherhood. She will try
nostrums of every kind, submit to any regimen however irksome, that
may be prescribed for her, and visit watering-places and other resorts
for the improvement of her physical condition; she will offer prayers
at one temple after another, or sometimes make long pilgrimages for
the purpose, in defiance of the popular belief that a child born in
answer to prayer is either itself doomed to early death or destined to
cut short its parents’ lives.
When the unpleasant symptoms of morning-sickness warn the wife that
she is about to become a mother, a midwife is called in from time
to time to examine her and relieve her pain. In the fifth month an
auspicious day is selected on which her relatives are invited to
dinner to hear the formal announcement of her interesting state.
On this day the midwife girds her under her clothes with a wide strip
of bleached cotton, with the object of keeping the child as small as
possible so as to ensure a light delivery. This girdle is worn up to
the moment of birth. With the same object the wife does considerable
amount of active housework, such as cleaning and sweeping the rooms,
until the beginning of the last month when she ceases from all work
and calmly awaits the delivery. Meanwhile, the midwife pays periodical
visits, and in a well-to-do family she is often made to live in the
house during the last month. She usually assists alone at the birth,
for a doctor is seldom called in unless complications have set in or
surgical operations are necessary. The accouchement, if indeed it
can be so called which in Japan takes place in a sitting posture, is
effected, if in the daytime, in a room darkened with half-closed doors
and a screen round the bed. The delivery is left as far as possible to
nature. The midwife, who is deeply versed in the intricacies of the
lunar calendar, can always tell the exact hour at which the tide
begins to flow, when the delivery oftenest occurs; and until that time
she merely soothes and alleviates. On the whole, the curse of Eve sits
lightly on her daughters in Japan, for which we have probably to thank
the simplicity of our diet and mode of life. The woman who dies in
child-birth is an object of infinite pity; her fate is supposed to be
the consequence of her sins in a former state of existence. In lonely
country-sides, in memory of such a woman, a piece of white cloth
supported on four sticks is set over a stream, together with a ladle,
with which passers-by are entreated to pour water into the cloth,
because only when the cloth rots away completely will she be purged
of her sins and enabled to enter Paradise.
Immediately the child is born, the midwife cuts off the umbilical
cord, washes the child in warm water, and dresses it in swaddling
clothes, after which it is shown to the mother and the rest of the
family. The after-birth is put in an earthen dish and covered with
another of the same material; the whole case is buried at the front
entrance, inside the door if a boy and outside if a girl, the reason
for the discrimination being that the latter is destined to
leave her home and, therefore, is not a permanent member of the
family. It is the custom now to have the case buried in a special
ground by a company formed for the purpose.
[Illustration: THE FIRST VISIT TO THE LOCAL SHRINE. (FROM A PICTURE
BY SUKENOBU).]
For the first day or two the child is given an infusion of a seaweed
which acts as a purgative; and if the mother is yet too weak, she gets
another woman to give it her milk until she is strong enough. She lies
with her head propped up high, and the child sleeps with her. On the
second day after the birth, the baby is washed again; and on the
sixth, friends and relatives are invited to a dinner to celebrate the
birth when the child’s name is given to it. The birth is also reported
on that day to the local office. The mother does not leave her bed
until the twenty-first day; and she is kept at low diet until the
seventy-fifth day when she can take the usual food and is considered
to be herself again. Until then she is supposed not to be purified
and cannot enter a temple or a shrine. On the same day she resumes
her household duties. In the meantime, the child is taken on the
thirty-first day if a boy and on the thirty-third if a girl, to the
shrine of the tutelary deity of the district, where prayers are
offered for its welfare. Then calls are made on those friends and
relatives who gave presents upon the child’s birth; and it receives
from them various toys, the principal of which is a papier-maché dog.
Such a dog is always placed at the head of the child’s bed at night
as a charm against evil influences.
The child is at first fed entirely with its mother’s milk; if she is
weak or sickly, a wet nurse is engaged in a family which can afford
one, but in poor homes the child is nourished with a very thin
rice-gruel. Cow’s milk is now largely used in Tokyo, and in many
families given together with human milk. Very often the former is
drunk in the daytime, and at night the mother who sleeps with the
baby, suckles it with her own milk. In Japan the mother, unless her
place is taken by the wet nurse, invariably sleeps with the youngest
child, and never leaves it by itself in a cot or bed. This has the
advantage that any ailment that the child may happen to suffer in the
course of the night is not left to be discovered in the morning when
it may be too late, but is detected at once and attended to
before it becomes serious. Thus, for instance, any rise in temperature
is immediately felt when the child gets its milk, and measures are
taken accordingly.
[Illustration: THE “FIRST-EATING.” (FROM A PICTURE BY SUKENOBU)]
On the hundred and ninth day after the birth, occurs the
“first-eating,” at which a tray of food is set before the baby.
Friends are invited to take part in the ceremony. A lady friend who
has a large family of her own is asked to feed the child. She puts
into its mouth a little paste of boiled rice and wets its lips with
a drop of soup. Though the child generally spits out the paste, the
fiction of its eating is maintained, and the ceremony closes with
feasting among the invited guests. This “first-eating” is usually
deferred for five or ten days as a postponement is supposed to bring
luck to the child.
The infant is expected not to be able to walk in less than a
twelvemonth; but if it toddles within a year, a bag holding about
three pints of uncooked rice is laid on its back, and the child is
made to stumble and fall, because to walk before the first birthday
augurs, according to one authority, early death and according
to another, residence in a distant land. There are many other
superstitions connected with infancy. Thus, a child that begins to
suck its fingers before the thumb which represents the parents in
Japanese palmistry, will not be an encumbrance upon its father when it
grows up; if it pushes itself out in sleep beyond the head of its bed,
it will rise in the world, while a downward course is in store for
the one that slips in under its bed-clothes. The baby which eats fish
before it can say _toto_, the child’s name for fish, will stammer when
it talks. In a family in which children have one after another died in
infancy, the birth of a healthy infant is ensured by such charms as
making a dress for it with thirty-three pieces of cloth collected from
as many families, shaving the child’s head till its seventh year, and
giving a boy a girl’s name and _vice-versa_. A sovereign remedy for
prickly heat is to hang over the front door by a piece of red thread a
small egg-plant before any member of the family eats one that season.
Crying at night is stopped by suspending over the child’s bed a
picture of a devil beating a prayer-gong. Immunity from measles is
secured by putting over the child’s head for a moment the
rice-pot still hot after the removal of the rice, while a similar
treatment with the bucket for feeding the sacred horse at a shrine
is said to be equally efficacious against small-pox. The child’s
face is wiped with a wet scrubbing-cloth to cure it of shyness
before strangers. For whooping-cough there are several remedies: for
instance, a wooden spatula with the child’s name and an invocation
against the disease is nailed over the front door; the inked string
used by carpenters for marking lines is tied loosely round the neck;
a slender piece of nandina wood, just long enough for the child to
grasp, is hung by a red thread to its neck; or a pair of small square
wooden blocks are obtained from a temple dedicated to Jizo, the
protector of children, when the child is suffering from whooping-cough
and clapped whenever it coughs, and when it has recovered, the blocks
are returned to the temple with another pair bearing the child’s name.
If the infant stands up and bending down its head, peeps from between
its legs, another child will soon be born in the family; and if it has
a single streak on its thigh as a birth-mark, the next to be born will
be a boy, but if the streaks are double, the next will be a girl.
Mothers are especially warned against leaving their children’s clothes
out to dry at night, for the souls of women dying at child-birth fly
in the form of birds at dead of night and if they see children’s
apparel, they will, from envy, drop their blood upon it and the wearer
of the clothing so soiled will surely sicken and die. Infants in arms
must, when out at night, be covered with their own loin-cloth to avert
the malign influences of the night-demon.
[Illustration: CARRYING CHILDREN.]
Japanese babies are at first carried in arms. When they fall asleep
in the daytime, they are laid on a bed in a room where they can be
watched. They get early used to noise, and slumber on though the
watchers may talk aloud to each other. When they are a month or more
old, they are carried not only in arms, but on the back as well. In
the latter case, the child is tied by a long piece of bleached cotton
which is first passed under its arms and over the nurse’s shoulders
and after crossing in front, one end is passed under the girl’s arm
and over the child’s thighs and tied at the side to the other
end. Thus, the piece is carried over the child’s back in parallel
lines and crosses on the nurse’s breast. In cold weather, the nurse
and her charge are covered with a kind of _haori_, thickly wadded,
before being tied with the cotton. It keeps them both warm, while the
child’s breast and stomach are even better protected by the contact of
the nurse’s back. Very young babies are tied down straight with their
legs close together; but when they are older, they ride astride and
their feet dangle on either side. The nurse who is specially engaged
for the purpose is twelve or thirteen years old; but in poor families
the elder brother or sister takes her place. Little girls are often to
be seen in the streets, carrying on their backs sisters and brothers
only a year or two younger than themselves, whose feet, as they
dangle, almost trail on the ground. At first the girls can hardly
walk with such burdens; but they soon get used to them, and they run,
romp, and dance with their companions without much concern for their
charges, who are often put in very uncomfortable positions. These,
however, fare worse when they are on their brothers’ backs; for these
urchins, being rougher and more careless than their sisters, fly
kites, climb up trees, flourish bamboo poles to catch cicadas, run
after dragon-flies, and even snowball one another, utterly regardless
of the discomfort they occasion their charges, who, if they cry, are
knocked with the back of the head, and seem soon to become habituated
to the dangers they run through the recklessness of their carriers.
This manner of carrying on the back is only possible with Japanese
clothes, for the knot of the _obi_ behind prevents the child from
slipping down; and it would be difficult to try this method with
European clothes, with men’s because the tying down of the coat would
hamper the movement of the arms, and with women’s because of the
multiplicity of pins at the neck and the waist. Nurses tie a towel
round their heads so as not to let their back-hair fall on the babies’
faces. When the children are older and able to walk, they are carried
without being tied down, for they can catch hold by the shoulders or
by putting their arms loosely round the nurse’s neck, while they are
kept from slipping by the nurse’s passing her hands under them.
Among little toys given to infants is a wooden whistle with either end
rounded into a ball. It is given to the child to suck and bite and
like the coral, hardens the gums, thereby facilitating the teething.
The time for teething varies of course with the individual child and
is the source of as much anxiety to the Japanese mother as to that of
any other country.
On the fifteenth of November in the second year after the birth,
the child is again taken to the shrine of the tutelary deity of the
locality. A small offering of money is made; and in return the
consecrated _sake_ in a flat unglazed earthenware is given to the
child to sip, while the priest purifies its body by waving over it a
sacred wand adorned with strips of paper. The ostensible object of the
visit is to invoke the God’s blessing upon the child; but it is really
made the occasion for dressing up the child in finery, when parents
vie with one another in the richness of their children’s apparel.
Calls are then made on the friends who made congratulatory presents
to the child. The shrine is visited again on the same day of the same
month two years later in the case of a boy and four years later if
the child is a girl.
As soon as the child is able to toddle along, sandals or plain clogs
are tied to its feet when it walks on the ground. It learns first to
walk indoors. As there are no go-carts in Japan, it tries to stand up
by clinging to pillars and sliding-doors, for it may stumble and flop
down on the soft mats without hurting itself; it is when it runs, as
children will do, without being able to stop, that the greatest care
has to be taken that it does not tumble over the edge of the verandah.
In Tokyo perambulators are now pretty common; but in the old days
there was no special means of conveyance for children, and they had
to be carried in arms or on the back.
There is no fixed time for weaning. After its first birthday, ordinary
food is given to the child little by little until in a year’s time it
is able to do without its milk. Generally speaking, however, the time
for weaning is governed by the arrival of a younger brother or sister;
but the youngest is often allowed to take its mother’s milk up to its
fifth or sixth year, though of course, as it can’t be common food, it
goes to its mother only for diversion.
At three or four years children are sent to kindergarten, that is, if
they can gain admission, for these useful institutions are still few
even in Tokyo. There they are kept in good humour, everything being
done for their amusement. They sing together simple songs, have
object lessons, are set to make little things out of paper, and are
also allowed to romp about as they please. At six years, the minimum
school-age, they enter the primary school, the course at which extends
over six years. Here they are taught Japanese, arithmetic, elements of
history, geography, and natural history, elementary drawing, singing,
and gymnastics, and hand work for boys and needlework for girls. This
six years’ course is compulsory for all children; and there is a
higher primary school with two years’ course for those boys who cannot
afford to receive any higher education. The pupils who have completed
the course at the ordinary primary school are qualified to present
themselves for the entrance examinations of the higher schools, the
middle school for boys and the high school for girls.
Although a women’s university was established not long ago in Tokyo, a
girl’s education generally stops with the high school, if it goes so
far. As she has been six years in the primary and four in the high
school, she has had ten years of schooling if she has passed every
class satisfactorily from the first to the last, and she is sixteen
years old when she leaves the high school. And as a Japanese girl
usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to
spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three
years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to
take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed
to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course
would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood,
and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were
they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. In the high
school the same subjects, more advanced, are taught as in the lower
school, the only new subject of importance being domestic economy.
The middle school has a course of five years, in which the pupils are
taught, besides the advanced course of the subjects studied in
the lower school, Chinese classics, algebra, geometry, physiology and
hygiene, physics and chemistry, law and political economy. English
becomes a subject of importance, being taught seven hours a week. When
the course is completed satisfactorily by regular promotion every
year, the pupil is seventeen years old. He is now ready to commence
his secondary education, for which he will enter the special higher
schools for the professions or the preparatory high school for the
university.
A very large percentage of children of the school-age pass through
the primary school; but of these a comparatively small proportion
enter the middle school, partly because many of them are too poor
or cannot be spared at home where they must help their fathers, and
partly because there are not middle schools enough to take in all
the applicants, though of late years these schools have greatly
multiplied. Formerly, parents were content to let their children
stop their education when they had passed the primary school unless
they intended to fit them for the professions; but now a general
recognition of the importance of education on modern lines has done
much to increase the demand for middle schools. There is still another
motive for entering the middle school. To the Japanese mother the
greatest source of anxiety on her boy’s account is his liability, when
he comes of age, to compulsory military service. Of course, he may
upon medical examination be pronounced unfit for service, or he may,
though strong enough, be exempted when lots are drawn among those who
have been passed by the medical examiners. But the former contingency
is naturally distasteful while the latter is too uncertain to be hoped
for with any degree of confidence. However, a comparatively easy way
of escaping some at least of the rigours of military service was
opened when the authorities permitted those who had completed the
middle-school course to offer themselves for a year’s voluntary
service. As such volunteers leave service with the rank of sergeant
at least, and even of commissioned officer if they pass certain
examinations, they are, needless to state, better treated than the
common soldiers. Moreover, though the prescribed age for conscription
is twenty, the students who enter colleges and other institutions
for secondary education are permitted to postpone their enlistment
until they graduate or reach the age of twenty-eight.
Children, as we have said, are very much petted. They are never
whipped or kicked, but occasionally slapped. Even at school they are
hardly ever subjected to corporal punishment; caning and birching are
unknown. Formerly they used to be made to stand on a school desk or
in a corner with a cup of water for half an hour or more; but now the
severest punishment is detention after school or suspension from
attendance for a certain period. Of course, at home or at school,
among their mates they may be knocked about; the hitting is done with
a swinging blow on the head or on the back, and very rarely with a
forward blow, for the art of boxing being unknown, the hits peculiar
to it are seldom resorted to. Kicking is not practised because, with
the clogs on, the kicker is as likely to hurt himself as the kicked,
while with the sandals or bare socks it is naturally out of the
question. People stamp with their clogs, but that can only be done
on a fallen foe.
Girls, when they congregate in the open air, play at blindman’s buff,
Puss-in-the-corner, and hide and seek, sing in a ring, and romp about
much in the same way as do their western cousins. Their amusements
are social, but quieter than those of boys, who though they play with
their sisters at first, develop, as in all other countries, sovereign
contempt for girlish sports when they approach their teens and engage
in rougher games of their own. Japanese boys do not box or use single
sticks, but they wrestle and fence. In wrestling, their object is to
make their adversary touch the ground with any part of his body or to
push him out of the ring, just as is done by professional wrestlers,
while the great point in fencing is to hit one’s opponent in a way
that would be fatal if a real sword were used. The fencing-sword is
made of four pieces of spliced bamboo bound together with a stout
string and capped at the tip with leather; it has a sword-guard
between the handle and the hilt. The combatants put on barred visors
with sides of thickly-wadded cloth, which is tightly tied at the neck.
They have also on thick gauntlets and body pieces of stout leather
around the waist. The legs are unprotected. Blows are given on
the crown, arms, waist, and legs, and a thrust is made at the throat.
Sometimes the fencers throw down their weapons and wrestle, when the
victor must bring down his opponent on the ground and getting astride
of him, untie the band and pull off his visor. It is an exercise more
exciting and fatiguing than fencing with foils.
[Illustration: FENCING.]
Birds’ nesting is unknown; but if birds are exempted from the Japanese
boy’s cruelty, their place is taken by the cicada and the dragon-fly,
and in late summer and early autumn, boys are to be seen running
after these insects with long lime-tipped bamboo poles and catching
the cicada as it emits its stridulous cry on the trunk of a tree and
the dragon-fly as it flits and flutters in the air. As these boys
flourish their poles in the open street, they not unfrequently catch
the unwary passers-by in the face, or their hats and clothes. But
butterflies and moths, in which Japan is especially rich, are free
from their pursuit. Indeed, Japanese boys do not as a rule go in for
collection of natural objects.